Just a short walk away is Albert Street, whose houses drip with ornamentation, with sphinxes outside doors, lions atop towers and theatrical elements everywhere. Riga has the highest concentration of Art Nouveau buildings in Europe, and at the end of the street, one facade reminiscent of a wedding cake stands next to another that looks more like a gingerbread house.
If all this talk of cakes makes you hungry, there’s plenty of good food in the city – so much, in fact, that Michelin has just unveiled its inaugural selection of restaurants there.
For superb seafood, you can’t go wrong at nearby Tails, a hip hangout with snazzy music where even the butter is shaped like little fish swimming across a scallop shell. For more traditional fare, Milda near the river has an incredible porcini soup served in a loaf of bread, which I followed with the tastiest of traditional cabbage rolls stuffed with buckwheat and pumpkin purée. And if you want to stock up for the train, the station is near one of the largest covered markets in Europe, set in five pavilions that were formerly Zeppelin hangars.
Before leaving, though, I chose to explore a darker side of Riga, also shared by Vilnius. Both cities (which were part of the Russian empire before the First World War) were occupied by the Soviets at the start of the Second World War when the Nazis invaded, decimating their Jewish populations, and again from 1945 until independence in the early 1990s. Both saw mass deportations to Siberia, and a reign of terror by the KGB.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/latvia/riga/riga-latvia-and-vilnius-lithuania-perfect-city-break-pair/
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Publish date : 2024-01-28 03:00:00
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